half the population is under the age of
thirty, and this has stoked excited con-
jecture in the international business
media about Indonesia's "demographic
dividend." And it is true that in Kali-
mantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo,
once known for its ferocious head-
hunters, you can now find gated com-
munities and Louis Vuitton bags. But
the emblems of consumer
modernity can be decep-
tive. While Jakarta tweets
more than any other city in
the world, and sixty-nine
million Indonesians---more
than the entire population
of the United Kingdom---
use Facebook, a tribe of
hunter-gatherers still dines
on bears in the dwindling
rain forests of Sumatra, and pre-burial
rites in nominally Christian Sumba in-
clude tea with the corpse.
This coexistence of the archaic and the
contemporary is only one of many
peculiarities that mark Indonesia as the
unlikeliest of the nation-states impro-
vised from the ruins of Europe's empires
after the Second World War. The mer-
chants and traders of the Netherlands,
who ruthlessly consolidated their power
in the region beginning in the seven-
teenth century, had given the archipelago
a semblance of unity, making Java its ad-
ministrative center. The Indonesian na-
tionalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the
Dutch out---in 1949, after a four-year
struggle---were keen to preserve their in-
heritance, and emulated the coercion, de-
ceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers.
But the country's makeshift quality has
always been apparent; it was revealed by
the alarmingly vague second sentence in
the declaration of independence from the
Netherlands, which reads, "Matters relat-
ing to the transfer of power etc. will be ex-
ecuted carefully and as soon as possible."
Indonesia, Pisani writes, "has been
working on that 'etc' ever since." To be
fair, Indonesians have had a lot to work
on. Building political and economic insti-
tutions was never going to be easy in a
geographically scattered country with a
crippling colonial legacy---low literacy,
high unemployment, and inflation. The
Japanese invasion and occupation during
the Second World War had undermined
the two incidental benefits of long Euro-
pean rule: a professional army and a bu-
reaucracy. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the
American novelist Richard Wright con-
cluded that "Indonesia has taken power
away from the Dutch, but she does not
know how to use it." Wright invested
his hopes for rapid national consolidation
in "the engineer who can build a project
out of eighty million human lives, a proj-
ect that can nourish them,
sustain them, and yet have
their voluntary loyalty."
Indonesia did have such a
person: Sukarno, a qualified
engineer and architect who
had become a prominent
insurgent against Dutch
rule. For a brief while, he
formed---with India's Jawa-
harlal Nehru and Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser---a kind of Holy
Trinity of the post-colonial world. But
Sukarno struggled to secure the loyalty of
the country's dissimilar peoples. In the
service of his nation-building project, he
deployed anti-imperialist rhetoric, na-
tionalized privately held industries, and
unleashed the military against seces-
sion-minded islanders. He developed an
ideology known as Nasakom (an at-
tempted blend of nationalism, Islam,
and Communism), before settling on a
more autocratic amalgam that he called
Guided Democracy.
By the early nineteen-sixties, Sukarno
was worried about the military, which
had been developing close links with the
Pentagon, and he sought to establish a
counterweight by strengthening the Par-
tai Komunis Indonesia, at that time the
largest Communist party outside the So-
viet Union and China. But a series of still
unclear events on the night of Septem-
ber 30, 1965, led to his downfall: several
members of the military high command
were murdered, provoking a counter-
coup by a general named Suharto. The
new rulers, Pisani writes, unleashed "a
tsunami of anti-P.K.I. propaganda, fol-
lowed by revenge killings." The military
zealously participated in the extermina-
tion of left-wing pests, and, as Pisani
points out, "many ordinary Indonesians
joined in with gusto." Various groups---
big landowners in Bali threatened by
landless peasants, Dayak tribes resentful
of ethnic Chinese---"used the great orgy
of violence to settle di erent scores." In
Sumatra, "gangster organizations a li-
ated with business interests developed a
special line in garroting communists who
had tried to organize plantation workers."
The killings of 1965 and 1966 remain
one of the great unpunished crimes of the
twentieth century. The recent documen-
tary "The Act of Killing" shows aging In-
donesians eagerly boasting of their role in
the exterminations.
This bloodletting inaugurated Suhar-
to's New Order---an even more transpar-
ent euphemism for despotism than Su-
karno's Guided Democracy had been.
Suharto o ered people rapid economic
growth through private investment and
foreign trade, without any guarantee of
democratic rights. Styling himself bapak,
or father, of all Indonesians, he proved
more successful than other stern paternal-
ists, such as the Shah of Iran and the Phil-
ippines'Ferdinand Marcos. One of his ad-
visers was a close reader of Samuel
Huntington's "Political Order in Chang-
ing Societies"(1968). The book's thesis---
that simultaneous political and economic
modernization could lead to chaos---was
often interpreted in developing countries
as a warning against unguided democracy.
Suharto, accordingly, combined hard-
nosed political domination with an ex-
panding network of economic patronage.
In e ect, he was one of the earliest expo-
nents of a model that China's rulers now
embody: crony capitalism mixed with
authoritarianism. He benefitted from
the fact that the massacres had not only
disposed of a strong political opposition
but also intimidated potential dissenters
among peasants and workers. According
to Huntington, the historical role of the
military in developing societies "is to open
the door to the middle class and to close
it on the lower class." Suharto, together
with his relatives and allies in the military
and in big business, pulled o this tricky
double maneuver for more than three de-
cades, helped by the country's wealth of
exportable natural resources (tin, timber,
oil, coal, rubber, and bauxite).
During the nineteen-seventies and
eighties, Jakarta expanded from the low-
rise city of Obama's childhood into a pe-
rennially gridlocked glass-and-steel meg-
alopolis. But with economic growth came
a revolution of aspirations and an in-
creasingly politicized public. In 1998,
after the Asian financial crisis exposed
the fragile foundations of Indonesia's
economic gains, Suharto's autocracy
66
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 4, 2014